South African farmers see barren future with evictions on horizon
The Telegraph

By Stephen Bevan in Ventersdorp, North West Province
(Filed: 23/10/2005)

He does not look like the leader of a resistance movement. Yet, as one of
the first half-dozen white farmers in South Africa to be forced to sell up
under its land reform programme, Pieter Jacobs is at the forefront of a
battle likely to be as bitterly fought as that in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

For eight years Mr Jacobs, 53, and six neighbouring landowners in the
Ventersdorp district of North West Province, have been disputing the claims
on their farms by the Bakwena tribe, who say that the land was taken from
them under apartheid laws. Now Mr Jacobs has been told that the farm where
he has lived for 30 years must be returned to the Bakwena, a ruling that has
profound implications for other white farmers.

He will be paid £940,000 for the 5,700-acre farm, but claims that it is
worth three times that. His 32 workers and their families will lose their
homes and their livelihoods but receive nothing.

"I'm not against land reform but it must be done in a proper way," Mr Jacobs
said. "Why force a productive farmer off his land?

"We are being seen as the bad people in South Africa, but if I leave this
farm, where are my workers going to live and work? The new owners will have
nothing. The government gives them no assistance.

"It's the same as Zimbabwe, only less brutal. At the end of the day the
result is the same. They are taking taxpayers' money and buying productive
farms to give to people who won't be able to produce on them because they
have no training or equipment."

The sudden haste on the part of South Africa's Commission on Restitution of
Land Rights is because, more than a decade after the end of the country's
apartheid regime, whites still own more than 80 per cent of commercial
agricultural land. As part of their attempt to tackle the legacy of
apartheid, black South Africans were encouraged to lodge claims for land
that they were forced to sell or that was designated as whites-only under
the old racial zoning laws.

Of the 9,000 land claims lodged by blacks in rural areas, fewer than 500
have been resolved, prompting the Government to extend the deadline for
settling all claims by a further two years to 2007 - to the embarrassment of
President Thabo Mbeki, who wants more rapid results.

The slow pace of land reform arouses strong passions among the black
majority and has come to symbolise the government's failure to deliver in
other areas, such as housing and basic services.

At first it proceeded only where landowners were willing to sell for an
agreed price, and expropriation was seen as a last resort - if nothing else,
for fear of scaring off foreign investors.

Now, however, the gloves are off. Blessing Mphela, the regional land
commissioner for Gauteng and North West Province, announced the country's
first expropriation in Lichtenburg three weeks ago, and said that he was
preparing to serve notices on another five farms - Mr Jacobs's among them.

Part of Mr Jacobs's opposition no doubt stems from his desire to get the
best possible price. He claims that the commission will not pay a fair price
for the "improvements" he has made to the land, including two farmhouses and
an abattoir that he said would cost £2.2 million to replace. Mr Jacobs lives
on the farm with his wife, Mariette, and 27-year-old son, also called
Pieter, who would one day have taken over the business.

"Please be fair to me," Mr Jacobs said. "It took me 20 years to build this
business, but for the last 10 I've been able to do nothing with it because
of the land claim. Now I must start all over again."

There is no disguising the sense of bitterness among these farmers about
what they regard as a politically motivated attack upon them. Mr Jacobs and
his neighbours say that they have never had a chance to contest the Bakwena
claim - and now they never will, because the government has changed the law
to enable it to expropriate land without first going to the land claims
court.

Like many such claims, the roots of the dispute are murky. According to
official records, the land was bought from an Afrikaner farmer in 1880 by
the Wesleyan Missionary Society, which leased the land to the Bakwena. When
the Church later sold up, it paid the Bakwena compensation for terminating
their leases and helped them to buy another farm.

The Bakwena say that they gave money to the Church to buy the land for them
and it had to be registered in the Church's name because black people were
not allowed to own property in that area.

There are no records of this, they say, precisely because it was designed to
circumvent the law.

Mr Mphela says that the farmers had not previously challenged the validity
of the Bakwena claim, and accuses them of trying to drag out the
negotiations even more.

"They want to refer it to a court because they know that court processes are
intractable," he said. "This is an attempt to buy time. But it won't help
any of us because the dispossessed communities then think the only option is
land invasions."

Hendrik Viviers and his son, Sarel, who farm about 1,400 acres and are also
facing expropriation, believe that they know why the commission won't go to
court.

"They knew their case wouldn't stand up so they waited until they changed
the law," Sarel said. "Now all we can do is go to court to challenge the
price."

Hendrik said: "This was one of the first land claims in South Africa and
they want to make an example of us. It's a political issue. Mugabe chased
the farmers in Zimbabwe off their land and now Mbeki is doing it too."

Mr Jacobs said that there are other farmers who would be happy to sell. With
the price of maize half what it was two years ago, farming is a tough
business.

He said that he will not stay in South Africa. "If they take my farm from me
I won't buy another here," he said. "What is to say that in another five
years they won't take that away from me as well?"

O.K, it looks as if South Africa is off my safari list as well.
Pity.
Maybe I will go on that Banteng hunt after all.

Cheers, Dave.
Non Illegitium Carborundum

My personal hero, Niccolo Machiavelli observed that for a nation to prosper it needed:

1. Strong Religion (not necessarily a state religion, but surely a strong belief to form a framework for its citizen's view of the world around them).

2. A strong military (you can have the moral high ground running out your ears, but without a strong military you will still get a pike-staff up your ass).

3. Strong laws (that is a nation with the rule of law, and without the arbitrary changes of those laws to suit the whim of the person in power at that moment).

Once the first farms are taken over, the government (ha, ha) will notice how good it feels. When I was a child, if something felt good (swinging on a swing set), I did it until I got tired, or until I got swatted (eating cookies from the jar after I learned to climb).

lawndart